Richard Gordon: DOCTOR AT LARGE

Hatrick screwed up his eyes as he grinned and said through his mask, 'He must be in love, sir.'

I almost wept into the wound.

As I grasped my retractor through the long surgical morning I glanced at Grimsdyke, who was sitting smugly at my right elbow, and wondered if he was perhaps right. Should I give in and marry Nurse Plumtree? After all, I was past the facile flirtations of a penniless medical student, and almost every morning _The Times_ proclaimed the virtuous love of one of my classmates. Nurse Plumtree would at least never be a nagger or a gossip, she was a tolerably good cook, and genuinely anxious to look after me. As the years rolled by I might be able to tolerate her brother and sister, while thankfully her parents could not live for ever.

Lunch was later, colder, and soggier than usual. Afterwards, I made an excuse about discussing the next anaesthetic and managed to have a word with Grimsdyke alone.

'Sorry I was rather unsympathetic last night,' he said cheerfully in the anaesthetic room, gripping the chin of a freshly-unconscious patient. 'But your cosy little evening chez Plumtree sounded so bloody funny I couldn't spoil the joke.'

'I think I may take your advice after all,' I announced.

'What? Marry the woman? But you're not even in love with her, are you?'

I shrugged my shoulders, and started fiddling with an ampoule of pentothal. 'What's love?' I said. 'It merely means that a certain system of genes in my chromosomes is about to be placed in relationship to an arrangement of genes in hers. To this biological end certain endocrine cells in her and myself pour out secretions that produce our secondary sex characteristics, such as the full bosom and rounded hips of Nurse Plumtree and the deep voice and hair on the chest of myself. I don't see that there's any more to it-'

'What disgusting nonsense! Anyway, you can't possibly marry a nurse. They make your life a horror of purgatives.'

'Then what the devil am I to do?' I asked him anxiously. 'So far you've been as useless as a letter-box on a tombstone.'

'The answer's simple, old lad. Have a bash at another woman. Hadn't you thought of it before?'

They wheeled the patient into the theatre then, but I finished the operating list in a happier frame of mind. In the emotional stress of the last two days I had forgotten Nurse Macpherson, and it cheered me to think that I could choose the primrose path to escape.

I saw little of Nurse Plumtree that day, for the operating list ended in a string of hernias, varicose veins, lipomas, biopsies, and cystoscopies that kept Hatrick and myself in the theatre until eight at night. I threw a white coat over my blood-smudged theatre clothes and hurried down to the wards, which on operating evenings resembled the French lines after Agincourt. Outside Constancy I was surprised to run into Nurse Plumtree in her cloak.

'I've got a strep. throat,' she said gazing at me sadly. 'I've got to go off duty.'

'Oh, hard luck.' I tried not to sound delighted. 'At least, it's nothing serious. I'll go round the ward with Nurse Summers instead. I couldn't have met you tonight anyway, not after that colossal list.'

'Don't give too much responsibility to that Nurse Macpherson,' she warned me. 'She's quite unreliable. Only this morning she mixed up the castor oils with the blanket baths. And don't stay up too late writing your notes. Promise?'

I nodded vigorously.

'I must go off to the path. lab. for a swab.' she ended softly. 'Good night, Richard, dear.'

'Good night. Hope you get better in no time, and all that.'

I went into the ward praying that her throat swab would reveal as sturdy a penicillin-resistant streptococcus as the bacteriologists had seen. It was a selfish thought, but at present complete isolation was the ideal state for Nurse Plumtree.

It was late before I left the ward with an armful of patients' notes to complete in my room. I ate my cold supper alone in the gloomy dining-room, found a bottle of beer in Grimsdyke's commode, and settled down at my small desk to reduce Mr Cambridge's surgical bravura to black and white. After midnight I wrote for the last time, 'Haemostasis secured and abdomen closed in layers,' collected the folders, and began to think constructively about Nurse Macpherson. As I walked across the quadrangle to the entrance of the surgical block, I prepared my plan. I would get her cosily into the corner of the ward kitchen, kiss her against the bread-cutting machine, and ask her out next Friday. She would accept delightedly, and the news would seep into the innermost cell of the nurses' isolation block by breakfast. I felt this was hardly the behaviour of a gentleman, but consoled myself by remembering that desperate ills need desperate remedies.

I was glad to find her in the ward kitchen as usual, alone.

'My, my, you're late!' she greeted me. 'Today's victims are all doing splendidly, and old Muggsy's sent up a couple of extras to help me cope. Hungry?'

'Phew!' I waved the air in front of my face. 'Have you been fumigating the mattresses or something?'

'Oh, that must be Jimmy Bingham's tobacco. How many eggs?'

I stiffened. Now I recognized unmistakably the foul breath of Bingham's pipe, which he lit with the air of a clumsy father on Guy Fakes Night after every meal.

'Bingham has been up here, has he?'

'Been up! He's eaten me out of house and home.'

My eyes caught the plate on the table, polished clean except for a rim of egg and a few forlorn rinds of bacon.

'And what was he doing in my ward?' I demanded.

She laughed. 'Oh, Jimmy comes up every night after you've gone-didn't you know? I was in the Professor's ward before I was sent here on days. We got to know each other pretty well.'

'Oh. I see.'

I had not allowed for a rival in my calculations and I felt outraged that this complication should take the form of Bingham. Deciding quickly that no sane woman could award him greater sex-appeal than a fourth-form schoolboy, I continued my plan.

'Here! What's the idea?' she demanded, as I wedged her into a corner.

'I only wanted to kiss you.'

'Oh, you did, did you? Well you can get that out of your mind to start with.'

'But you let me yesterday,' I said in surprise.

'Well, I won't today.'

'Come out on Friday.'

'No.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm going out with Jimmy Bingham. Now if you'd like the ward report, Mr Gordon, you may have it.'

I drew in my breath.

'Thank you, Nurse Macpherson. I should.'

I rose the next morning a bitter man. Not only had Bingham condemned me to a lifetime of living with Nurse Plumtree, but his rivalry for the favours of Nurse Macpherson had the familiar psychological effect of making her wildly desirable. It also brought to an end the professional honeymoon that Bingham and I had enjoyed since my return to the hospital. My toleration was already stretched thin, because of his unendearing social habits. There was only one bathroom on our floor, where he came to shave every morning while I was taking my bath. On my first day in the Staff Quarters he had greeted me heartily with, 'Good morning, old chap. While there's life there's soap, eh?' which was passably funny as a before-breakfast pleasantry, but when he repeated it the next morning, the morning after that, and every morning for the following weeks, I was ready to slit his throat with his own razor.

At meals, Bingham made a point of sitting next to me to emphasize our new chumminess, and though he was too careful about money to let slip a technicality and incur a fine he found it difficult to keep his thoughts away from his work while eating. 'Perirenal fat, hylum, medulla, and pelvis,' he murmured during supper one evening.

'Look out,' I whispered. 'If the Senior Resident hears you, you'll be down half a crown.'